Tag Archives: Blogging

I spoke at the TECHNE doctoral congress on the subject of the “balancing acts” required early career researchers as you start on academic career paths. The slides from my talk are here, and I also wanted to signpost a few other blog posts where I’ve written more fully about some of these issues, and direct you to some related resources on other websites.

Teaching – some great resources on the Royal Historical Society ECR pages (obviously aimed at historians, but more widely applicable).

Digital identity – my colleague Allan Johnson gave an excellent talk about social media as an academic, and I spoke a bit about my experience of this in the questions. I’ve written about this here and have lots of related resources compiled here. For online communities, #phdchat and #ecrchat are great hubs for careers discussion, and for Arts students, @wethehumanities is a brilliant place to start networking with other arts researchers, whether you’re new to twitter or an old hand.

The subject of ECR wellbeing came up in one of the discussion sessions; I recently spoke about this and slides are available here, full post coming soon. I’d recommend the excellent academia and mental health resources on Nadine Muller’s blog.

Today I spoke at “Researching our Futures“, a student-led conference on career options post-PhD. My talk was titled “Digitising our futures: early career professionalization in the digital sphere” and I spoke about how an online identity can help you develop as an ECR. The slides from my talk are here. For quick reference, I’ve listed below the websites and resources from the end of the slides.

I spoke to Tomi Oladepo, who runs the brilliant Digital Media Culture blog, about what digital media means to me as an academic. We talked particularly about the changing culture of academic digital media usage over the past few years, the context of public engagement, and where digital media seems to be going. It was a very thought-provoking discussion for me – thanks to Tomi for featuring me on the blog.

The new issue of Open Letters Monthly is out today, and in among a host of exciting arts and literary reviews you’ll find a piece by me on Tatiana Holway’s The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created. This intriguing new study explores the history of the Victoria regia water lily that became an evocative symbol of the Victorian era, and Holway’s study takes us from the banks of the Amazon in the 1830s to the doors of the Crystal Palace in 1851, with an intriguing history unfolding in between. I very much enjoyed the book and, well, you can read the rest of the review over at OLM!

I’m not long back from the BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA conference The Global and the Local held in San Servolo, Venice from 3rd-6th June. There were so many fascinating papers over the few days, but the highlight for me was the excellent range of Dickens papers presented, and in particular the Local/Global Dickens position-paper seminar that I participated in. I’ve written more about this in a post for the Journal of Victorian Culture online, which you can read here.

I’m very pleased to feature today on The Daily Dose, the excellent blog series run by Dr Brandy Schillace on her fabulous blog. Brandy Schillace is a medical humanities scholar working at the intersection between medical history and literature, and The Daily Dose provides regular features on scholars working in these areas. Although I’m not strictly a medical humanist I do have a keen interest in literary bodies, and in my guest post I talk about some of the travelling bodies that I investigate in the Victorian novel, giving a brief glimpse into my sunburnt travellers that will be the focus of a chapter of my monograph. My piece is here, you can find the rest of the series here, and you should also explore the fantastic “Fiction Reboot“!

It wouldn’t be the new year without a traditional round-up reflecting on blogging and research activity, so in this post I thought I’d pick out some of my blog highlights of the year (both most-read and personal favourites) and look at how 2013 is starting to shape up.

2012 was of course the year of Dickens, and this blog has seen more than it’s fair share of Dickens posts this year (by March I was considering renaming the blog accordingly!) and as such I’m giving Dickens a round-up of his own:

1. Happy Birthday Dickens! On the day of the bicentenary I spoke on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire radio about Dickens’s connections to the Warwick and Coventry area, which I picked up on in this birthday blog post about Dickens and Leamington Spa.

4. Walking Dickens’s London– in a post for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online I took a walk around London following The Guardian’s Dickens at 200 audio walks, and reflected in this post about the value of retracing literary places.

Looking ahead to 2013 there are lots of exciting projects in the works. First up, I’ve been invited as guest editor for the next issue of Victorian Networkon “Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture” which will be out in March. Two big publications deadlines are looming: I’m hoping to submit the manuscript of my monograph Journeys in the Victorian Novel: Gendered Mobilities and the Place of the Nationfor review in April, andGender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920will be submitted to Pickering and Chatto in August, ready for publication in March 2014. I’m writing up a paper on gender and rural mobility in George Eliot’s early works for this, and also planning to write up work on Henry Mayhew’s 1851 in the near future.

And there’s still more Dickens to come! I’m redrafting my paper on Dickens and literary tourism, and working this into a collaborative piece with Dr Peter Kirwan titled “A Tale of Two Londons: Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012” which will reflect on issues of canonicity and the politics of place employed in the parallel celebrations of Dickens and Shakespeare in 2012, exploring how these shaped and located the nation’s cultural capital in the Olympic year. In April I’m heading to the University of Cagliari in Sardinia as a visiting lecturer to teach classes on Dickens and travel, and later in the year there’s a potential Brussels trip which will enable me to get started on some work in preparation for (yes, really) the 2016 bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth.

Thank you to everyone who has read, commented and tweeted me about the blog this year, and all the best for 2013!